by Stephen Deas
For a long time Berren said nothing. ‘And what’s your oath?’ he asked at last.
‘To see, come what may of you, that the child is cared for. Your child, once it is born.’
Slowly Berren rose to his feet. ‘And how much would it cost for a man to buy her? You told me, a week or two before Syannis broke his promise, that she was worth a half-dozen seasons in the company.’
‘For a good bonds-maid, you’ll pay in gold. For one who has waited on a princess, a lot of gold.’
‘How much gold? I’ll sell my sword. Everything I have.’
He watched as Talon winced. ‘You had nothing when I found you and you have nothing now, save that purse I’ve given you. Everything else has been taken by Princess Gelisya to pay for the damage done to her property.’
‘Damage?’ Berren felt the blood running to his head. He shouted up at Talon, ‘What damage?’
‘Her slave is carrying your child. I thought you knew. It affects her duties.’
‘Sun and Moon! She sent Fasha with a warlock’s love potion to help her bed me! What else have I done? Am I to pay for the arrow I used to kill Meridian?’ If Talon had been standing in front of him instead of looming over the top of the pit, there would have been blood. ‘She was promised to me,’ he hissed. ‘A man can break his word as freely and as often as he likes, but he can never once un-break it. That was the payment I sought from Syannis: a word given and a promise kept. Just that.’ He threw the purse back at Talon. ‘And I made a promise too. I promised Fasha that she’d be free. I promised her that because of the flogging you made me give her; and I will keep my word, whatever it costs me now, and Syannis can shrivel up inside as he looks on. If I must now buy what was offered freely, let this be my payment. I have no use for it.’ He started to pace in angry circles.
‘It’s not enough, Berren.’
‘Then what is? How long, Prince Talon? How long should I fight for you and save every coin I earn? How long while I watch the rest of your soldiers go home with fat pockets to their waiting families or buy the land they so crave and start new ones?’
He heard Talon sigh, a long drawn-out sound. ‘A year. Two. Maybe three, maybe four. Things will change here. Now the war is done, the coffers of Tethis will slowly begin to fill again. Syannis will come to his senses and see how poorly he has treated you. Princess Gelisya is already in her years of changing. She will shed her childish ways. All these things will come to pass.’
‘A year, then. I’ll fight for you for one year.’
‘Four and I promise you she will be yours.’
‘Is a promise from you worth more than one from your brother?’
He almost heard Talon wince. ‘You’ll have to decide that for yourself. Now, do I have your oath or do you want to stay down there?’ The Prince of War moved to stand beside the ropes that would lower the cage down into the pit. Berren stared up at him. If he could have grown wings then he would have flown up and hurled Talon down to be in his place and then taken his sword and let the castle run red with blood. One king, two kings, ten kings, what did it matter? They all looked the same when they were dead. But no wings came and slowly the cold truth spoke to him: Talon was the only reason he was still alive, and Talon had done him no wrong. If he refused this oath, if he stayed, then he’d be dead before dawn. When he spoke, his voice was calm.
‘Very well then. You have my oath. I vow on the life of my child that is not yet born that I will never seek revenge for the wrongs that your brother Syannis or any here have done me. Be it one year or four, I will fight and I will kill for you until I can buy back what is mine.’
He watched the cage slowly descend towards him, glad that Talon couldn’t read his thoughts, glad that the gloom hid the bitterness written over his face.
It will not be revenge. It will be justice.
PART FIVE
THE KING-SLAYER AND THE CUCKOO
28
SEASONS AWAY
The Hawks sailed from Tethis. There were fewer of them than had arrived. Some of the men of Forgenver had returned to their homes. Others finally had the money to put their soldiering days behind them and a good few were dead. But though many had taken the king’s coin to serve in the king’s new guard after the war was done, not one of them remained in Tethis when Talon set sail. Syannis had made it clear they were not welcome, not wanted, disqualified by their loyalty to the Prince of War. Instead, he recruited from the soldiers who had fought for Meridian, from the Deephaven lancers, even from the old king’s guard. Berren caught a glimpse of Lucama, decked out in the new colours of the old king. There would be trouble, Tarn warned. Radek and Meridian had allies and families. There would be more fighting, more battles, always more companies falling to the sword. Berren shrugged it away. Whoever sat on the throne, Princess Gelisya would be there with them; and as long as she remained, so would Fasha and so would his son or his daughter, whichever it turned out to be.
The company travelled far to the south, Talon putting as much distance between them and Tethis as possible. They met the Mountain Panther and his men once again; now the Hawks fought side by side with soldiers whom half a year ago they’d faced across a battlefield. Berren found himself among the legions of the sun-king, clad in glittering armour, facing wild horsemen who danced around the clumsy footmen and fired their bows and then wheeled and turned and fired again. He learned to brace a spear against a charging horse, how to advance behind a wall of heavy shields that the horsemen with their bows couldn’t penetrate. He watched as massed ranks of armoured cavalry charged across the field ahead of him, as volleys of crossbow fire darkened the sky, as cohorts of battle-priests called down the sun to scorch the earth and rendered men into ash in the blink of an eye. He saw war machines he could not have imagined existing. The Hawks became nothing but a tiny speck in a vast engine sent by the sun-king to quell the rebellious west of his Dominion once and for all. Now and then Talon would tell them where they were heading or whom they were fighting, or what town or city lay ahead of them. Berren listened with care, but the names meant little. When he marched, he thought only of the battle to come. When he fought, he thought only of the victory that would follow. And when that victory came, he thought only of the dead and the treasures they might carry. Friend or foe, he looted them all, and in the nights when Tarn and the others were out gambling and drinking their plunder away, Berren sat alone in their camp, counting his coins as though they were days.
The season lasted long into the autumn, so long that Talon kept them together in the south for the winter. When spring came, they fought for the sun-king again, but some dispute had caused the battle-priests and many of the officers to leave, and that second year did not go so well. By the end of it, half the men in Tarn’s cohort were dead or gone, their boots filled by olive-skinned men Talon recruited from wherever he could find them. They spoke in a strange sing-song accent that Berren could hardly understand, and they had never heard of Tethis, or of Kalda or Aria. That year homes and tongues and skins all ceased to matter; all that counted was that a soldier fought and fought hard, that he stayed in the line and held his place, and that when the time came to run, they all ran together. They found the remnants of the Deephaven lancers, a score of them, and Berren found some comfort in talking to them of their home. They’d come from the same city and they knew its nooks and crannies and understood its beauty and its ugliness as he did. The lancer from Kalda was there, the man Berren had flattened after the rest of them had tried to kill Talon with their fire-globe. They eyed each other for a while, trying to remember where they’d seen one another, and then they talked and they drank and each apologised for trying to kill the other, but it was war and they’d been soldiers on opposite sides so there were no hard feelings to be taken. The Berren that had landed back then in Kalda, he would never have done such a thing, never even understood it, but that was a Berren who had never seen a real war, not the fields full of slaughter that the sun-king’s armies left behind them, win or lose. The
Berren he had become took the lancer to the nearest bottle of wine and drank with him and became his friend. A soldier was a soldier. Kings changed, alliances shifted, but the men who fought for them bore no grudges.
Now and then he heard whispers of Tethis. Aimes still sat on the throne and Prince Syannis still ruled in all but name, erratic and vicious while the kingdom simmered with discontent. No one had raised an army to seek revenge for Meridian and the little kingdom was at peace, but still, it was an uneasy one. He asked for word of Gelisya and Fasha, and eventually he had an answer. The queen’s bonds-maid had given birth to a boy. What had happened to him since, none of them could say.
He had a son.
The lancers became his friends, twenty men lost in a world they only half understood. They taught him to ride, to hold a spear steady in a gallop and how to look after a horse. Talon had been reluctant to take them at first, complaining of the cost of their animals. But after the sun-king’s armies broke for the second time that season and the Hawks found themselves in the midst of a rout, he changed his mind. The lancers were imposing enough to deter the gleeful bloodlust of thousands of enemy horsemen towards easier targets, and the Hawks escaped what might have been their slaughter.
Towards the end of that second year, as the sun-king’s armies nursed their wounds, Berren took to giving sword lessons as a way to fill the days. He taught men as Tasahre had taught him, and Syannis and Silvestre too. He taught them to be quick, to be dirty, to thumb their nose at honour and grace and cheat every way they could if it would keep them alive. His reputation spread – the Bloody Judge of Tethis – and by the end of the season soldiers from other companies, even officers from the sun-king’s armies, were coming to him to learn.
He wintered again in the south. This time Talon went away. When he returned, months later, he wouldn’t say where he’d been but Berren could see it in his face: he’d been home and what he’d seen had scared him.
‘Your slave is alive and well,’ he said to Berren one day as they prepared for battle once more. ‘The child too. When this season is over, I promise you will see them again. It’s been long enough now.’
See them, Berren thought bitterly. Not touch them or hold them or feel them or talk to them. See them. Like promising a cup to man dying of thirst, but only the cup, not the water that should go in it.
The battle-priests and the officers returned for that last year, and fresh legions came with them. The rebels crumbled and the sun-king’s armies swept through them like fire. Berren saw cities that dwarfed Tethis burned to the ground, their entire populations crucified as a warning to others. The roads were lined with crosses; the air stank of death and decay, but he found it didn’t bother him. At night, when there was nowhere better to seek plunder, he would cut down the corpses and search, in case the soldiers who had strung up the bodies had missed something. One late summer evening, with the war done and behind them, as the Hawks began the long road to the ships that would take them home again, Berren caught sight of himself in a puddle by the roadside. For a moment he paused, bemused. The man staring back at him was a stranger. Gaunt, with lines on his face that he’d never seen before and a badly trimmed beard. He had a dozen scars from three years of fighting and his whole shape had changed. But most of all he didn’t recognise the eyes. They were cold soulless things. He looked at his hands, the calluses around his palm. They were forged for killing now, and when he tried to imagine them against Fasha’s silky-soft skin, he could only see the horror in her face as she recoiled from their senseless touch. The feeling passed, but it was a while before he understood its meaning. He was afraid. After three years of fighting, a score of battles, after killing more men than he could count, he was afraid that something inside him had changed and was lost and would never be found again.
‘Do I have enough?’ he asked Talon as they made their way home, standing together at the prow of Talon’s ship. The sun-king and his armies were gone, and Kalda was drifting towards them. It was exactly how he remembered it, how he’d seen it when he’d been a ship’s skag four years earlier. It had even been the same time of year.
‘I hope so.’ Talon laughed bitterly. ‘When Syannis takes one look at what you’ve become, he’ll give her away for free if there’s any sense left in him.’ He looked Berren up and down. ‘The Bloody Judge, the King-Slayer, the Crown-Taker. How many men have fallen to your swords? You have become terrible to behold, my friend.’
Yet beneath the Bloody Judge lay Berren, not long a man. And Fasha? And my son? What will they see?
29
THE KNIFE OF CUTTING SOULS
They disembarked from the ship. Before the Hawks dispersed and went their separate ways, Talon took a roll-call of his men, of who would return to fight again next year and who would not. Most boarded new ships to take them home, wherever home happened to be. Others, like Talon and Tarn and Berren, let the city swallow them up, each finding his own comforts for the winter months. Talon took Berren and Tarn to the taverns they’d visited years ago. They got blind drunk together, passed out together, woke up the next day and did it again. Berren drank to numb the fear inside him. Talon . . . Talon drank a lot when he wasn’t fighting at the best of times, but there was something different now, some shared desire for oblivion that drew them together. Tarn drank to keep them company. Berren and Tarn had been tight as a sailor’s cleat in the years of fighting; now Berren felt him slipping away from both of them. He and Talon each carried a burden that the other understood, ones that Tarn could never share.
‘Did Syannis ever tell you what happened to Aimes?’ Talon slurred one night, when they were both well into their cups.
Berren shook his head. Aimes wasn’t right in the head, and if Berren hadn’t known that already, it would have been obvious from the moment they’d met in the flesh. ‘Didn’t you say he was kicked in the head by a horse?’ There was more, though, and it had something to do with Saffran Kuy. Syannis had let that much slip.
‘Syannis always thought it was his fault. He’d been so used to the idea that he was going to be king one day. When Aimes arrived I suppose he couldn’t help but be jealous. Then Kuy came. He always made the hairs on my skin prickle, but I was only a boy while Syannis was into his changing years. I couldn’t tell you whether Kuy sought Syannis out or whether it was the other way around, but they became like thieves, always together, always skulking apart from the rest of us. I used to follow them around the castle, secretly so they didn’t know I was there, but I wasn’t very good at it and they usually caught me.’ He laughed. ‘It used to drive Syannis wild.’
Talon leaned closer. He glanced around as though he was worried they might be overheard. ‘A couple of years later, there was the accident. Syannis has it in his head that Kuy somehow made it happen, that one of the warlocks did it so that Syannis could be king after all, but I know better. Aimes had a pony. He was starting to learn to ride. He loved the ponies and the foals. The big horses scared him, but he used to play around the stables, and that’s where they found him. The stable master said he must have climbed through to the king’s hunting horses and then slipped. Fallen over and cried out and spooked them. They knocked him down and one of them kicked him. After a decade of soldiering, I’ve seen enough people go funny from being thumped on the head.’
He covered his eyes. ‘Syannis wasn’t there but he always thought that Saffran Kuy had made it happen, and that he’d made it happen so that Syannis could be king. Thing is, he wasn’t there but I was. I saw it all. I told Syannis too, but he never shook the idea that Kuy had cast some sort of spell on Aimes, or on the horses, or maybe on both. But there was one part I never told Syannis. See, it wasn’t Saffran Kuy who arranged it so that Syannis could be king, it was me. My fault. Aimes didn’t crawl in with the hunting horses at all. He was there because I put him there. He didn’t fall; he was screaming because he was scared, and that was what spooked them. I saw him go down. Watched it and did nothing. I couldn’t tell you which one kicked him. I
never liked Aimes. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but I can’t say as I was ever particularly sorry.’
He stared into his ale and then drained it. ‘It’s all gone wrong, Master Berren. Syannis always said that once Meridian was gone and we had our kingdom back, he’d be able to fix it. Make it right, or else Kuy would. And then something happened. I don’t know what, but it was before we fought Meridian. Something changed. When Aimes sent Kuy away, I thought it wouldn’t be long before he was back. I would have killed the bastard too. But he went and he stayed gone for a long time and Syannis did nothing to stop it, and yet nothing is any better than it was before, and he can’t make it right because no one can. Aimes is still a child inside and he always will be. There’s no cure for that. Tethis is falling apart and Syannis too. He’s so lost, Berren.’
Talon shook his head. Then he laughed. ‘He had some wild idea, from the moment he first saw you in Deephaven, that Saffran Kuy had cut a piece of Aimes’ spirit away to make him the way he is, and that whatever part of Aimes he’d had taken out, you had it. Just because you looked like him. Thought that for years, for all that time you were together in Deephaven and in Forgenver too, even when the two of you went to Tethis together. But in the Pit something changed. When he came out, he didn’t believe it any more. He never talked about it, just said it had been a stupid fantasy and that he’d never really believed it in the first place, but I know Kuy got to him while he was in the Pit. Kept him alive, if you take Syannis’s word for it, but there was a price for that, because there always is. Kuy took Syannis’s hope.’